For a production system, 'scheduling' aims to find out which machine/worker processes which job at what time to produce the best result for user-set objectives, such as minimising the total cost. Finding the optimal solution to a large scheduling problem, however, is extremely time
consuming due to the high complexity. To reduce this time to one instance, Dr Wei Weng, from the Institute of Liberal Arts and Science, Kanazawa University in Japan, is leading research projects on developing online scheduling and control systems that provide near-optimal solutions in real
time, even for large production systems. In her system, a large scheduling problem will be solved as distributed small problems and information of jobs and machines is collected online to provide results instantly. This will bring two big changes: 1. Large scheduling problems, for which it
tends to take days to reach the optimal solution, will be solved instantly by reaching near-optimal solutions; 2. Rescheduling, which is still difficult to be made in real time by optimization algorithms, will be completed instantly in case some urgent jobs arrive or some scheduled jobs need
to be changed or cancelled during production. The projects have great potential in raising efficiency of scheduling and production control in future smart industry and enabling achieving lower costs, higher productivity and better customer service.
Realtime production scheduling and control systems in smart industry
